Last night, I was out having a drink with a friend of mine. Because we are both nerds and writers, our conversation steered into nerdy writer territory and stayed there. It was unseasonably warm, so we sat on an outdoor patio -- one of the few that isn't rendered useless to me by an army of smok...

Ryan's home for the holidays, before he moves far, far away for his new job (hey, check out my son! He graduated college last week, and he starts a great job in two weeks! Go Ryan!!) The first night he was home, I told him that the warm covers for the bed he's sleeping on were in the dryer, so...

Beer stuff! I wanted to make Jaime Paglia an oatmeal stout, because that's his favorite. When I went to the shop to get supplies, though, Greg (who owns it) told me that you really have to do a partial mash or all-grain to get it just right. I'm not quite ready for that, yet, so I went with my b...

There is a tree near my house, that has probably been there for years, just doing its tree thing, watching patiently as families come and go, empires rise and fall, and Isengard is flooded. I'm sure it's a beautiful tree, cheerfully trading carbon dioxide for oxygen, providing shade, and most li...

I feel about the same, on Xbox though, so I hated dealing with the snotnosed punks on Halo. Actually, the worst part of playing games like that is dealing with the snotnosed punks. I suppose the second worst is remembering the full range of uses for the 11 individual controls on the Xbox controller.
I'm a lot happier playing relatively simple-to-control games that are cute (Cthulhu Saves the World), cute and somewhat challenging (the Lego series), or simple to control but requiring intelligence (I recently discovered Limbo).
It's considerably more pleasant for me to actually enjoy the experience than it is to deal with the opprobrium of online pubescent mouth-breathers, all of whom are truly shoddy ambassadors for the products they claim to like.
Halo isn't for wankers - so why do so many wankers play it?

A pair of twenty-something Bros, dressed and posed in a manner that was such a hilarious cliche, if I described them exactly as I saw them, my editor would have said, "no, that's too cliche," stood near the front of the store, communicating in some kind of Broglish that leaned heavily on the wor...

The alarm went off at 7 this morning. Though I was asleep around 11 last night, the jolt of misery that shot through my body as I reached over to turn it off confirmed -- again -- that I am not a Morning Person. I slowly opened my eyes, and saw that Anne had already gotten out of bed. In her pla...

The thing about paywalls is this. Someone has to produce the content, and somehow they have to get paid. Blogs such as this one are a valuable public service, something enjoyed by many, but done out of the goodness of your heart. For income, you're doing other things.
Professional journalists, scholars, science writers, and so on are actually doing the jobs they get paid for when they write, and if that material is posted for free, how can they pay their bills?
Paywalls suck, when you're looking for free information; but as a commerce model, I can't think of another viable alternative.

Earlier this morning, I saw a story at Daily Kos that really upset me. It's the sort of thing that I would hope transcends political ideology, and I thought that if I submitted it to Reddit, maybe it would eventually attract enough attention to make some kind of difference. I didn't want to link...

I have a question for everyone who reads my blog: if I put some short stories I'd written together into a little collection and sold it at Lulu, would you be interested? I ask this because I collected a few short stories into a limited edition chapbook for last year's PAX Prime, and it's been si...

A couple of years ago, GPS units were the hot Christmas gift, and the category looked like it had some staying power. But that growth trajectory has taken a detour, thanks to smart phones like Motorola's Droid and Apple's iPhone, which contain GPS navigation functions. That's not the first time ...

"[E]very PC and Mac used to come with a slot for a floppy disk drive, first the 5 1/4-inch version and later the sturdier 3.5-inch version."
Minor quibble here. No Mac ever sold with a built-in 5.25 floppy drive. They were 3.5 from the beginning.
The coolest Walkman I ever had was the size of a tape case. It extended about 1/2" so you could insert a cassette. Cost me about $100 in the mid 80s.

A couple of years ago, GPS units were the hot Christmas gift, and the category looked like it had some staying power. But that growth trajectory has taken a detour, thanks to smart phones like Motorola's Droid and Apple's iPhone, which contain GPS navigation functions. That's not the first time ...

The hardest part of losing my cat Mira was dealing with Sputnik's grief. He couldn't find her anywhere, and looked and looked and called and called for her.
Probably the most painful moment was when I was reviewing a video I'd made of them. This was maybe a year after Mira died. In the video my voice was audible, calling her name and talking to her like I used to do.
Sputnik heard the recorded voice and his ears perked up, and he looked all around for her, waiting for her to come walking into the room.
That memory -- of his sweet, forlorn hope -- still makes me cry.
It will get less painful, less acute and immediate, but it will never completely stop hurting. That's how you know it's love.

I saw Ferris' empty dish last night when I fed Riley, and it unleashed an agonizing wave of sadness so overwhelming, I dropped to the floor in our living room and cried as hard and as long as I ever have in my life. After she was finished eating, Riley came over to me and sniffed at my face. Th...

Sitting in my office, my brain is in that weird writer's fugue where time blurs and I take -10 to all my passive perception checks. I realize that my dog, who has spent much of the day at my feet, doing everything she can to capture my attention, isn't there. I'm not sure how long it's been sinc...

This made it past my mail filters last night: This is youur penis: 8--o This is youur penis on drugs: 8=====O Any questionss? He said. Yes, and he can beat any man in the country of the kaurava king (suyodhana) with all his followers an apportionment bill and carefully revise it of view. Insol...

This made it past my mail filters last night: This is youur penis: 8--o This is youur penis on drugs: 8=====O Any questionss? He said. Yes, and he can beat any man in the country of the kaurava king (suyodhana) with all his followers an apportionment bill and carefully revise it of view. Insol...

The poor choice of product association is only part of it; you've gotta admit that the trend of naming things "Obama" is in itself a fairly obnoxious thing to do. (Full disclosure: I voted for him.)
What's going to happen if he turns out to totally suck?

That Barack Obama enjoys vast popularity worldwide is not in dispute. So, what better way to cash in on—er, pay homage to—American's first black president than by ... naming and marketing a fried-chicken product after him? That's what Sprehe, a German frozen-food company, apparently figured, ...

Sure, it's a goofy song, but it's also fun as hell. The video's even more bizarre, adding a surreal layer of nonsense to something already nonsensical, causing everything nearby to collapse into -- not a perfectly sensible black hole, but instead a chartreuse hole lined with pink llama fur. Or something.
But it's still a fun song.

Last night, Nolan went through my iTunes library so he could put some of my awesome music on his iPod. He's been after me for months to give him Radiohead, The Beatles, Tool, Decemberists, and a lot of my 80s stuff. While he looked, the following exchange occurred: Nolan: Why do you have The Sa...

My plans to spend last night with the Basic D&D Dungeon Master's Booklet were derailed when I got a late-afternoon phone call from my manager. "You have a pilot audition tomorrow," he said. "I'm sending you all the material right now." He described the show to me; it sounds very cool. He describ...

One of the super-useful bits of advice I picked up somewhere about writing and blogging goes like this: most people can't write for a book and a blog at the same time, because our brains get different kinds of feedback and rewards from each. For most of us, if we had to pick, we'll write in our ...

A quick word on editors and working with them. Expect criticism; and expect it to be constructive.
Some people take on the task of editing with the attitude that whatever they say must be worthwhile. They can strike down passages or redact items with a high degree of baffling opacity, and don't necessarily offer very good reasons for why they've done it. Such individuals are incredibly annoying to work with. If you think you've got such an editor, see if you can find someone else willing to be more flexible.
By contrast a good editor will spot more than technical mistakes; she or he will point out areas where your writing might have lost its punch, or even its way, and suggest means to improve it. Rather than replacing swaths of your own work with his or her own, a good editor will highlight the troubled places and offer some advice on smoothing or improving.
Also, a good editor should be very well read. A literalist who's taken in little more than Hemingway would simply have his head explode on reading Faulkner; and a purist who's steeped in Niven would balk at Delany. A good editor will have a decent grasp of your narrative and understand what you're driving at, and will be able to see where things don't entirely fit -- and, more importantly, will be able to say why.
(I realize the foregoing is given in the context of fiction editing, but that's because that's what I've done most myself.)
That said, it's possible, as a creator, to feel nettled when you seem to be confronted with complaints; try to walk the delicate line between feeling protective and interactively working with your editor as a partner in the final polish of your prize.
Oh. One more thing. You'll find yourself absolutely in love with a lyrical bit of prose in something you've written, and see it's been flagged for redaction. Believe me, it happens to everyone. Redact it, because as beautiful as it is, it probably doesn't belong; but save it somewhere so you can use it again in another context, where it might find a better fit.

The positive response to Sunken Treasure has surprised and delighted me even more than the fantastic sales of both the print and PDF versions. As of this writing, PDF sales have vastly exceeded my expectations, and though print sales have slowed, they haven't stopped. I've seen a direct relation...

Hey, Wil, what are you using for a page layout program?
The heavy hitters -- InDesign and Quark -- cost like hell, and each has its foibles. Quark took forever to upgrade to OSX, long enough that InDesign basically took the market over. While InDesign is stabler by and large, and integrates quite well with Photoshop and Illustrator (naturally), it still can't do automatic imposing of pages, to the best of my knowledge. This is a rather significant and baffling omission.
However, its handling of OpenType fonts is outstanding, and its export to PDF, once you understand the technical aspects, is superb.
On the platform specific side MS has Publisher. I've never used it, so can't really comment on it. So too for Pages from Apple. Grossly, these apps have fewer finessing options available, but they also cost considerably less than the big guns.
For creation of raw content I prefer DevonNote. This is a surprisingly inexpensive OSX app that I like for one specific reason: I can group my chapters as individual files within folders in the app, letting me shift them around as necessary, and I can use something like aliases as well. (It's also got native formatting, exports to RTF, PDF and HTML, and can import a genuinely surprising array of file formats.)
This is good for me because in an involved narrative it lets me write a complete set of chapters as an arc for a character or set of them, then interweave the chapters for comparison to see how the assembled work will look. That way I can have several storylines in development at once for the finished piece, but also treat them as linear narratives for purposes of continuity.
If I didn't have access to InDesign, I'd probably work with Pages for final layout, but for composition DevonNote really does the trick. (As a bonus it integrates with all of OSX's text handling and spelling extensions natively.)
Pages basically replaced AppleWorks, I think; that was what I'd been using before. That was okay, but had just enough quirks and frustrations that I dropped it as soon as I could get my hands on InDesign. And ended up with an entirely new set of quirks and frustrations, of course.
Anyway, I was just curious about the creation, prepress and publishing software you're using, since I know you've got stacks of loads of heaps of free time and whatnot to talk about such things. The self-publishing info you've presented here is good, but it's only part of the story...

The positive response to Sunken Treasure has surprised and delighted me even more than the fantastic sales of both the print and PDF versions. As of this writing, PDF sales have vastly exceeded my expectations, and though print sales have slowed, they haven't stopped. I've seen a direct relation...

I just found out that my episode of Criminal Minds, Paradise, is going to be rerun this Wednesday, March 4 at 9pm Eastern and Pacific on CBS. I am tremendously proud of the work I did on this show, and I hope that, if you missed it the first time around, or you wanted to watch it again after rea...

When you break the world down into dog people and cat people, I guess I'm mostly a dog person, even though I've loved every cat I've ever owned. Sometimes, though, my dog tests me, like in this entry from the vault... When I was at CES [a few weeks ago] for InDigital, I got a phone call from Ann...

What sold me on ST was the personal angle. I'd been reading your blog for a bit, following your tweets, and when you put it on Lulu I was already primed. There was a personal connection there, something that couldn't have been manufactured by Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
That's significant, I think. I bought ST not because of any advance reviews, or the possibility of reading the Next Great American Whatever, but because I wanted to see what was in it, because I like your blog, your writing and your onscreen work.
There's something here, something far deeper than any PR work could make, the idea of an intimate personal connection on some level. This is interesting, and it's making me think about how I'll be doing things at work tomorrow.
Not so much about how to manufacture or create a "personal" connection -- rather, how to authentically let it germinate and grow.

Five (Three sir!) Three quick Sunken Treasure items: 1. I was interviewed for the Lulu blog about the book. Fun fact: It was while I was writing the answers for this interview that I sent Twitter the fateful question about $5 DRM-free PDFs. I finished my answers and sent them back right before I...

I can echo what Wil wrote. My micropress requires aggressive self-promotion on the part of the authors. More candidly, I'm not sure "real" publishers are the model to follow any more in any case.
Osborne/McGraw-Hill published a tech book I wrote back in the early double-oughts, and while it was well-received in its limited demographic, even then I was expected to take up a lot of the weight in re marketing it. Well dammit, Jim, I'm a writer, not a PR man. (And thus, irony, as later events proved.)
If you've got a story that roxxors boxxors, it might be a mistake to try to pimp it the oldschool way via agents, or sending things over the transom to land in a slush pile. It might be more worthwhile to consider setting yourself up with a blog account, or installing a blog script to your site (if you have the site, and the desire/skill to install the engine yourself), and just post excerpts or entire short pieces there.
One of my personal delights here, specifically now, is seeing how well Sunken Treasure is doing, how well it's being received, and especially reading about Wil's sale spike when the PDF went live. In truth this didn't surprise me; it's just a documented example of what I've suspected to be the case for the last several years.
To wit: Giving your content away for free or nearly so doesn't reduce hardcopy sales. It can increase it enormously. Parallel discoveries were made in music (pirated concert tapes, cf. early-80's Metallica), then discarded (Metallica and DRM, or, "Metallica: A history of Heavy Metal Irony").
The other thing Wil mentioned is editing. You can't trade a good editor for his or her weight in gold. Both Stephen King and JK Rowling have two things in common: (1) Their books are hugely successful; and (2) they work best when working with a strong editor who knows how to say "redact" in a meaningful way. (Actually, you can say the same of Lucas: Witness SW eps I - III vs. IV - VI.)
It's worth giving Lulu a shot, if you've got the DTP software to create a more or less finished document, and the skill/desire to create a prepress-ready piece. If your work is shorter than book length, consider putting it online and generating a fanbase, and whatever, whatever you do, keep writing.

Five (Three sir!) Three quick Sunken Treasure items: 1. I was interviewed for the Lulu blog about the book. Fun fact: It was while I was writing the answers for this interview that I sent Twitter the fateful question about $5 DRM-free PDFs. I finished my answers and sent them back right before I...